Oliver Stone

Born on September 15, 1946 in New York, William Oliver Stone is the son of a Jewish stockbroker and a French Catholic. When he was 15 years old, his parents divorced due to his father’s continuous infidelity. During the summers he spends long periods with his maternal grandparents in France, where his father gets the boy a job in a financial company that would serve as inspiration for his film Wall Street much later .

After the first year Oliver Stone was admitted to the prestigious Yale University, leaving his studies to travel to South Vietnam to teach English at a school for six months. He then travels to Mexico, where he is arrested for possession of marijuana, and returns to university for a while, although instead of studying he focuses his efforts on writing “A Child’s Night Dream”, an autobiographical novel.

In September 1967, Oliver Stone enlisted in the army, and was sent to the front lines in Vietnam, where he stayed for 15 months, during which he received various decorations. Back home, he graduates from New York University film school, where he taught with the great Martin Scorsese .

After a few shorts, such as Last Year in Viet Nam , he made his feature film debut with Seizure , a horror film of little interest. The script for The Midnight Express is then worked on in depth , based on the autobiographical book by Billy Hayes, an American arrested for drug possession in Istanbul, subjected to all kinds of harassment in prison. Directed by the British Alan Parker , the Hollywood Academy awarded Oliver Stone’s adapted screenplay with an Oscar.

Divorced from Majwa Sarkis, in 1981 he would join the assistant director Elizabeth Burkit Cox, with whom he had two children, Sean and Michael. Later –in 1996– he would pair up with Sun-jung Jung, who would be the mother of his daughter Tara.

His return to directing, with The Hand , a bland horror film with Michael Caine , flopped spectacularly. In this way, during the first half of the 1980s, Oliver Stone concentrated on his career as a screenwriter, with titles such as Conan, the Barbarian , Manhattan Sur and, above all , The Price of Power , for which he carried out exhaustive research. from the underworld of drug trafficking, and composed memorable phrases such as the well-remembered “say hello to my little friend.”

When he resumed his role as director, he denounced the ravages of the war in Central America in the interesting Salvador, whose screenplay co-written by Stone also competed for the Oscars, as did the protagonist, James Woods , an excellent war correspondent.

The definitive consecration would come to Oliver Stone with Platoon , from 1986, directed and also written by him (the filmmaker has intervened in all the scripts of his films except in the case of Turn to hell ). Conceived from his own war experiences, the filmmaker offers a realistic version of the conflict along the lines of titles like Apocalypse Now , and in contrast to triumphalist titles like John Wayne ‘s Green Berets .. His denunciation of excesses committed by the American army made rivers of ink flow. She was the great winner of the Oscars that year, winning the categories of sound, editing, director and film. In the following years, Stone would finalize a kind of trilogy on Vietnam, with Born on the Fourth of July , with Tom Cruise , around the civil protests in the United States, and Heaven and Earth , where he portrays the Vietnamese civilian population through from the love story of an American ( Tommy Lee Jones ) with a native.

It had a huge impact on Wall Street , which warned of the abuses that can be reached in the financial world. Michael Douglas won an Oscar for his work as the ambitious Gordon Gekko. He has a scheme similar to his other great work, Platoon , where the protagonist, Chris, was torn between the good influences of the honest Sergeant Elias, and the bad example of the unscrupulous Sergeant Barnes. Here he uses the same actor, Charlie Sheen , who as Bud Fox is torn between the good intentions of his union father, Carl (played by his real father, Martin Sheen ) and the model proposed by the ambitious capitalist Gekko.

Oliver Stone’s third major title is undoubtedly JFK , about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which disclosed the conclusions of Jim Garrison, New Orleans district attorney. He questioned the thesis of the Warren Commission, which defended that the assassination was the work of a single man (Lee Oswald) and pointed out the existence of a complex conspiracy.

In the 90s, Stone kept busy, with titles like The Doors –which reconstructs the life of singer Jim Morrison–, Natural Born Killers -based on a script by Quentin Tarantino rewritten by him–, Nixon , Turn to Hell and above all the interesting Un Any given Sunday , which puts the commodification of professional sport in doubt. During those years, the director also had time to write the musical Evita for Alan Parker , and to produce titles such as The Von Bullow Mystery , Blue Steel or The Larry Flint Scandal .

However, with the dawn of the new millennium, his career somewhat languishes. He delivers two over-indulgent documentaries on Fidel Castro, titled Comandante and Looking for Fidel . He disappoints with Alexander the Great ‘s ambitious but flawed portrayal of the Macedonian leader. He did not achieve the desired impact with W. , about President George Bush, played by Josh Brolin . He did not finish convincing either with Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps , a deteriorated sequel to his film on the Stock Market. Those years, he only seems to be saved from the burning World Trade Center, reconstruction of the real drama of two policemen trapped under the rubble of the Twin Towers, on 9/11.

In addition, it has not stopped sparking controversy, first with its participation in a humanitarian mission in Colombia, which sought the release of three hostages of the FARC guerrillas, whose members were described as heroes, despite the fact that the US government considers them a group terrorist. In an interview with the Sunday Times in 2010, he declared himself a communist, criticized Obama for not lifting a finger to stop the coup in Honduras, and irritated the Jewish community when he went so far as to say that “Hitler is the scapegoat of history.” ), although he later retracted.He lashes out at the brutality of the Mexican drug cartels in Oliver Stone’s Salvajes, his latest work.